Those familiar with existing advertising distribution techniques will appreciate the advertising spend wastage problem. Much advertising, whether online or through traditional media, is delivered to consumers without regard to their buying intent and/or personal interests. There are three main types of existing online advertisement solutions that attempt to address this problem. These include advertisement delivery with search, advertisement delivery with content, and advertisement delivery using a behavioral network.
In an advertisement delivery with search scheme, advertisements are delivered by a search engine provider along with search results. Typically, the advertisements selected for display are contextually related to a search phrase. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/272,026, entitled “SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR SELECTING DIGITAL ADVERTISEMENTS” and published on Jun. 8, 2006 as Publication No. 2006/0123001, discloses another example of a search-based system, in which digital advertisements to be sent to a user's computer are chosen based on information relating to searches conducted by the user. In this example, advertisements are related to searches, but might not necessarily be returned to the user with search results. However, search context-based advertisement delivery mechanisms do not capture the ongoing buying intent and/or other personal interests of a user.
Advertisement delivery with content involves delivering advertisements with the content of a portal, in a webpage for instance. The advertisements selected for display are normally contextually related to the content of the portal. As noted above for search context, content context analysis does not capture the ongoing buying intent and/or other personal interests of the user.
For some currently available advertisement delivery mechanisms using a behavioral network, the “network” is a limited community of cooperating portals. These portals participate as members of an “ad network”. As a user visits the portals, cookies and/or web beacons can be used to track and log the user and the user's behavior within the ad network. Advertisements are selected for delivery with the content of a portal according to the identity of the user and the user's tracked behavior.
An ad network implementation requires a community of cooperating portals to be established. One problem with this type of behavioral ad network lies in the limited extent of such a network, which can lead to difficulties in tracking users. When a user traverses portals that are outside the domain of an ad network, the ad network loses the ability to track the behavior of the user, thus limiting its effectiveness. Advertisers thus cannot be certain of the accuracy of behavioral assessments, since users may have visited many sites that are not within the portal community of an ad network. In addition, further tracking problems can arise when users disable cookies.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/863,593, entitled “APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR COLLECTING AND ANALYZING COMMUNICATIONS DATA” and published on Aug. 8, 2002 as Publication No. 2002/0105911, proposes a system in which packets are extracted from data received from a first communication line and statistics corresponding to the packets are then recursively generated. Although this patent application concentrates primarily on communication network management based on these statistics, reference is made to profiling data about users or their traffic on such networks. A network monitor might filter each received packet based on its contents, such as by looking for specific text within packets or for web sites visited by a user. The level of user behavioral analysis in this patent application appears to be limited, since packet content filtering techniques are not disclosed in detail. Content delivery also appears to be independent of current in-process user access activities, as is evident from the disclosed example of targeted email as a content delivery mechanism.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/833,444, entitled “USER PROFILING COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM” and published on Nov. 6, 2003 as Publication No. 2003/0207685, also discloses user profiling for a system in which a user has multiple terminals. The terminals cooperate to transfer automatically gathered user profile information, which includes service access information for accessing services. The user profiles are used for a different purpose in this published patent application, for service access rather than advertisement or other content delivery.
Thus, there remains a need for improved targeted electronic content delivery control techniques.